Enabling the Next Stage of Innovation in Mobile Networks

By Cohere Technologies | News | 0 Comments

The mobile industry has come a long way in last 30 years. It would have been difficult for even the most optimistic person back then to imagine how far the industry would come. When the Internet Protocol (IP) emerged as the dominant network architecture for the rapidly growing data market, Flash-OFDM (LTE and 4G) was invented to allow the cellular networks to mobilise the internet, however the takeoff of smartphones fast exposed the limitations of 3G. To enable the massive demands of the mobile internet, 4G/LTE was rapidly deployed to enable harmonised networks on a global scale.

Cohere developed the Delay/Doppler model to deliver a Massive Multi-user MIMO without the problems currently surfacing as operators try to deploy 5G. Cohere’s approach provides an accurate channel estimate and prediction, which are the essential ingredients for beam forming, a channel that ages slowly and is fully independent of modulation. It allows Massive Mu-MIMO on both Time-division duplex (TDD) and Frequency-division duplex (FDD), meaning it can deliver many of the benefits of 5G on 4G networks.. Perhaps most importantly, it enables an overall network architecture that is consistent with the evolution of the cloud.

5G takes a 4G radio airlink (with some subtle changes) and tries to “reuse it” many times in the same geographic area, thereby creating far greater capacity from the same spectrum. This is accomplished with “beam forming”, which the industry calls Massive Mu-MIMO It’s very similar to what the Fiber industry did when they created WDM, allowing a single fiber to be used over and over by separating wavelengths, or “colors”. This created tremendous leverage as a single fiber strand could function like many, many strands. Fiber optic capacity increased dramatically without needing to redeploy new cables in new trenches. That same leverage can be delivered to spectrum through smart antennas, or Massive Mu-MIMO. The concept is simple, but the deployment issues are complex in today’s TDD/FDD model.

It is an exciting time for the industry, a major quantum step forward is now possible. It is now becoming more affordable for operators to deploy 5G, providing far greater capacity, far higher peak rates, and opening the future to new applications that can coexist on a single channel using the “Delay/Doppler” approach. Continued demands for faster mobile networks, enterprise automation and consumer applications which require low latency, and with billions of connected devices and sensors, drive the demand for 5G.